PaintShop Photo Pro X3 Product Review

Software Name: Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3

My Star Rating: 2 stars out of 5 = I Don’t Like It

Summary Statement: Instant Photo Viewer a Total Disaster and Reason Enough to Uninstall the Program Entirely

I have the limited edition with exclusive bonus pack which provides “over $250 in extra value” of a 2FB USB flash drive, KPT collection plug in, Corel Painter Essentials 4, and Corel WinZip 14.5 Pro. Mine came with a short quick start guide (which was too bare bones to be helpful) and a small page size 137 page paper guidebook. The fact that Corel issues different packs, some with a user manual and some without is something that some customers are upset about. So, know that there are different packs sold and pick the one you want!

I own and older edition of Photoshop Elements (a less expensive pared down version of the professional Photoshop) and am used to PS Elements. I will note that PaintShop Photo Pro X3 is the same pricing as PS Elements and from what I have been able to figure out before trying Corels' product, the two programs are very similar in content as well.

Before I tell why I am dissatisfied I’ll share my opinion that if you already have a photo editing program, you probably should stick with that product and buy updates as you feel are necessary. There is a large and painful learning curve when moving from one software to another. The terms are different, the process is different, and it’s just too painful to put oneself through unnecessarily. I am asking myself why I bothered to want to try PaintShop Photo Pro X3 when I was happy with (my no longer latest version of) Photoshop Elements. I guess I was thinking maybe this was better and why not get this and stop using PSE? I’m sorry I wasted my time. Before I say why I don’t like this program I’ll give more info.

I am looking for very basic photo editing tools. I take photos with a DSLR but am more into the actual taking of well composed and well lit photographs than I am into spending hours of my time editing shots.  What I want photo editing for are some simple things such as: cropping photos, resizing photo files to make them smaller when necessary (i.e. submitting photos to newspapers and websites), to remove red eye, to make a soft edge on a photo and perhaps to adjust an overexposed or underexposed photo.

Regarding projects, which this software does, I’m honestly not sure how I would use this. When making a photo book I would make it right on the site that professionally prints the book. When I make a photo Christmas card I make the soft edge on the photo right on the warehouse store website.  When I make a photo calendar I used the warehouse store’s website to create it from home on the internet, and they print it and I pick it up at the store.

I have a six month old computer PC: Windows 7 Premium and an i3 processor. It is not yet clogged up with too many files and had plenty of room on it for new programs. Installation was easy and took me about 90 minutes only because I would walk away and realize there were many steps and it was waiting for me to keep clicking more boxes.  I was confused though, over having to install multiple programs all from the same CDROM, and was unclear what the differences were between: Paintshop Photo Pro X3, Project Creator, Painter Essentials 4 and KPT collection (that one I did not even bother installing). I did the registration online; there were no phone numbers for me to call. Some reviewers mentioned ads on the screen, I saw no ads. I have over 30,000 photo files on my hard drive at the time this was installed. I don’t understand why other reviewers are saying it took hours to load this software given the number of images on their hard drive.

The instruction manual was promising offering 4 ways for new users to learn to use the system: the Corel guide, the Learning Center palette, the help system and web-based resources. Despite this seemingly wonderful array of options when it came down to figuring out how to do something as simple such as resize a photo to scale it down to 72 dpi I could not find the answer. I still can’t figure out how to see if it saved the file as jpg or if it is saving it with some other format (i.e. raw, gif). I was annoyed that searches with common keywords such as ‘resize’ turned up no results. I could not find any of this information in the user manual either.

When working to edit a photo I was annoyed that multiple images I was not using were lined up at the bottom which it randomly pulled off my hard drive, it was distracting. I am used to working with a program where the only thing on your work surface is what you have chosen to work on right now. I found that I could adjust the viewing box to get larger that pushed those off the screen.

The absolute worst thing about this program which is why I am uninstalling it and giving up is ---- the program over-wrote my existing program to view photo files that were already on my hard drive. When I try to open a photo by clicking on the file on my hard drive, it opens in the Corel Instant Viewer which is a piece of garbage that first pauses for 2 seconds doing nothing while it loads, then it shows an image for 2 seconds in a pixelated blurry mess before sharpening up to view it. Moving to the next photo using the arrow, such as to view photos you took on a certain day, takes 4 seconds to load each photo and my eyes go crazy with the sharp to blurry to sharp to blurry images. I cannot stand this Corel Instant Viewer.  It is impossible to quickly click through the photos. My old software from the Canon camera would instantly load with no pause and it would immediately be in perfect focus. This thing that Corel has is ridiculous.

After spending 4+ hours installing and trying to edit one photograph to just crop it to zoom in, reading the user manual and the online help, just trying to get one photo to convert to 72 dpi and jpg format, and not being able to figure it out, I give up on the program and am going back to Photoshop Elements. The simplest editing task should not be that difficult to figure out.

At at the very least a photo program on a brand new, high speed computer should not take 4 seconds to load one photo image and make us look at it for 2 seconds blurry first – there is no need for such madness.o:p>

Disclosure: I received this product from Amazon.com for the Vine program in order to review it on Amazon.com. I was under no obligation to blog it. See my blog's sidebar for the link to my blog's full disclosure statement.